Still Here, Just Not Writing...

Work has been... well, kind of hectic lately, but not for reasons I can really talk about here. And really the hecticness (hecticity?) has just involved stuff going on in meetings that hasn't really affected my actual work yet. Just the jostlings involved in any project, I guess, just a bunch of stuff coming up at once rather than a little at a time. I'm actually feeling very laid-back about it all.

Last night was gaming night at Subrata's, and we played a game of Res Publica, a new card game I bought in Madison which turns out to be fairly neat. Or so it seems from a sample set of one, and I won that one (by a pretty decent margin). People found the rules hard to get used to, but seemed to be doing okay by the end, and no one seemed to hate it. Subrata agreed that it's worth trying again. I'm certainly up for that.

This weekend I have a bunch of stuff lined up, all of which will probably be worth talking about in my journal, and I probably won't have time to write it all until Monday! There is, for instance The Date. (The Subject of The Date reads my journal, though, so who knows how much I'll feel comfortable writing about? Or, she might not want me to write anything about it, which I would respect.)

For you Mac fans, Apple announced a number of new hardware products yesterday at MacWorld New York. The highlights (for me) were:

1. Dual-processor G4 towers, for the same price as the old single-processor machines. The prevailing theory is that this is a carrot to persuade customers to upgrade to Mac OS X when it ships (since OS X supports multiple processors, and OS 9's support is limited). I have heard that the technology of the G4 chip allows dual-processor boxes to be produced at only a marginally higher cost than single-processor machines, and that Pentiums are unlikely to be able to do this. Score one for us!

2. The G4 "cube", a small single-processor G4 machine without a fan. The main drawback is apparently a lack of expansion slots, plus it's slightly more expensive than comparable towers. My guess is that some people who can use small machines like this will buy them now, but 18 months from now they'll be cheaper than the towers.

3. A new revision to the iMac line, featuring faster machines and new colors, with new price points. I'm not sure I like the new colors as much as the old "flavors", and in particular they really need a purple shade in the new line. It'll be interesting to see how they sell.

4. A new keyboard and an optical mouse, both of which will be standard on all Macs from here on. The optical mouse looks cool. I have no idea what makes the keyboard neat.

5. New monitors (we call them "displays"), which also look pretty neat, but are otherwise the same as the old monitors.

Oh, yeah: Apple also announced it quarterly profits, which were good enough to get us profit sharing for the quarter. Woo-hoo! Next quarter should be even better, since I guess the back-to-school and Christmas quarters are our really successful ones.